My Ethnic Diversity Class Got Me A Little Wound Up
And don't it make your blood boil.
When you realize, this late in life, how much you've been lied to, how much has been sweep under a pretty rug, how much shit you've unknowingly swallowed all your god damn days. When you thought you were educated, intelligent, insightful. Maybe you knew that America wasn't the golden land of opportunity and beauty that they keep make believing it was. You knew there was racism, and discrimination, and so on, and so forth, and so on.
But now, it really all makes sense. A hideous, sick, clicking sense.
Don't it make your eyes well with tears.
When you suddenly know that this land isn't tarnished, it was never fucking gold to begin with.
And don't it make you wonder.
When half of your brothers and sisters are in jail, you think, damn, we've got a problem. When you know that percentage hasn't changed since the abolition of slavery, it makes you really think for the first time ever.
And you ask why.
When slavery ended, corporations started slipping incarceration institutions some change to rent prisoners. A cheap labor force.
And don't it make you grit your teeth.
When you learn that your net worth will be one-eighth of that of people that you live with, you think, Jesus. I am literally worth less than the people I love.
When you realize that big businesses follow white communities like sharks after the blood trail, you start to see where you really are.
And don't it hurt your soul.
When you see how the country you trusted enough to live tore down the homes of your grandparents and left them on the street, calling it beautification, your heart begins to turn.
When the brightest men of an era concluded with all certainty that your race was biologically crippled, genetically damaged and unworthy, you think about all the things that were instilled in you as a child. These things we learn, that are burned in our brains, that we must know and believe through and through, do they ever really go away?
When we came from nothing, you start to ask, how can we be anything? If we started out with the cruel deficit of slavery, hatred, scientific discrimination, how can words on paper make it all equal out?
And don't it open your eyes.
When you see your golden nation full of tin factories, the ghettos and projects that we make believe don't exist. The factories that pump out the gangsters and gang-bangers and sick social stereotypes according the original white design. They told us what to be, and by golly, like good little Negroes we stuck to the blue print.
And now, here we are. Calling a place that we were stolen away to home. A place with a legacy that no one will admit to, and we almost forget exists, so we don't really know how things got this god damn bad.
And maybe it doesn't even matter how things got things got this fucking bad, even if it makes your blood boil, and your eyes tear, and your teeth grind, and your soul ache. If your eyes are open, we've got a chance.
And don't it just make you want to change it all to gold?